In recent years, digital cameras capable of sensing an image and outputting the sensed image as digital image data are widely used. Cellular phones having such a camera function are also becoming popular. To print an image sensed by a camera or cellular phone and use it as a photo, normally, the digital image data is temporarily captured from the digital camera or cellular phone to a PC (personal computer). After image processing is executed by the PC, the image data is output from the PC to a printer such as a color printer and printed.
Recently, a color print system capable of transmitting digital image data directly from a camera to a printer without intervening a PC and printing the image data, and a so-called photo-direct (PD) printer capable of inserting a memory card, which is loaded in a camera to store sensed image data, directly in a color printer, and reading out and printing the image data stored in the memory card are also developed. Especially, a system which can directly transfer image data from a camera to a color printer through an interface such as a USB and print the image data is called a camera direct, USB direct, or digital camera direct print and is beginning to widely penetrate among users who are not good at PC operations. Since an industrial standard specification “PictBridge” which defines the communication protocol in camera direct print has been announced recently, transmitting image data directly from a camera to a printer and printing the data are becoming prevalent.
Printers which employ the camera direct print function are commercially available now. Along with this, new solutions for cellular phones with a camera function also begin to appear so that an image sensed by a cellular phone is transferred directly to a printer and printed by employing the direct print function.
In PictBridge, image data corresponding to the Capability of a printer is supplied from an image supply device (digital camera or cellular phone) to the printer. Many images sensed by the above-described cellular phone having a camera function are encoded by EXIF/JPEG. The printer can also cope with EXIF/JPEG as an image format. Upon printing using such printer, encoded image data is sent directly to the printer through a USB cable.
Many printers can process only the EXIF/JPEG image format which is suitable for photo print. It is however expected that cellular phones will be able to handle a variety of image formats in the future to meet the demands of the market.
Especially for cellular phone users, various kinds of communication services using the Internet or original communication networks are provided, including mail services as a representative one. The mail services include a service to attach photo image data or data of another format to mail, which allows users to exchange image data of various formats. Hence, in camera direct print, a desire to handle image data of various kinds of formats except the above-described image format will arise obviously.
However, since resources that can be installed in a printer are limited, it is very difficult to cope with such a variety of image formats. Since even a digital camera or cellular phone cannot be equipped with all functions to cope with the variety of image formats, it is not practical to cope with all image formats.
To connect such a camera to the Internet and execute image processing impossible for the camera, a technique has been proposed (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-189886), in which image data is transferred to a server on the Internet to cause the server to manipulate and convert the sensed image, and the converted image data is received.
However, in the above-described technique of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-189886, at most, functions unavailable in a camera are executed by a server. When a camera and a printer are connected to execute print, functions (e.g., N-up print or date print) out of the Capability of the printer cannot be implemented. In the conventional mechanism, an N-up print or date print designation can be selected on the camera-side UI in accordance with the Capability of the printer. If the function (N-up or date print) is not included in the Capability of the printer, there is no means to instruct print by operations on the cellular phone side.